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Exchange Turns Into Political Flashpoint

WASHINGTON, Jan 12 — A passing exchange during a Senate hearing on Thursday turned into a political flashpoint overnight as Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice accused one another of insensitivity in comments about motherhood and the war in Iraq.

In an interview this afternoon with The New York Times, Ms. Rice suggested that the California Democrat had set back feminism by suggesting during the hearing that the childless Ms. Rice had paid no price in the Iraq war.

“I thought it was okay to be single,” Ms. Rice said. “I thought it was okay to not have children, and I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children.”

During the Thursday hearing, Ms. Boxer told Ms. Rice: “You’re not going to pay any particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family.”

In a separate interview, Senator Boxer said her comments had been misunderstood and were now being turned against her by the White House and other Republicans. “What I was trying to do in this exchange was to find common ground with Condi Rice,” Ms. Boxer said, adding that “my whole point was to focus on the military families who pay the price.”

“They’re getting this off on a non-existent thing that I didn’t say,” Ms. Boxer said. “I’m saying, she’s like me, we do not have families who are in the military. What they are doing is a really tortured way to attack a United States Senator who voted against the war.”

The exchange between Ms. Boxer and Ms. Rice came during a hostile Senate hearing on Thursday in which Ms. Rice, seeking to sell President Bush’s new Iraq plan to a skeptical Congress, faced an almost solid wall of opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. Ms. Boxer several times repeated the question, “who pays the price?”

Senator Boxer read excerpts from a radio interview with an American family that lost a son in Iraq. “You can’t begin to imagine how you celebrate any holiday or birthday,” Ms. Boxer said. “There’s an absence. It’s not like the person’s never been there. They always were there and now they’re not and you’re looking at an empty hole.”

Ms. Rice replied, “I can never do anything to replace any of those lost men and women in uniform, or the diplomats, some of whom ...”

Ms. Boxer cut her off. “Madame Secretary, please, I know you feel terrible about it. That’s not the point. I was making the case as to who pays the price for your decisions.”

During the hearing itself, Ms. Rice did not appear to take issue with Ms. Boxer’s comments. During the interview, she addressed them only in response to a question. But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, had suggested earlier today that Senator Boxer’s comments were anti-feminist.

In the interview, Ms. Rice said that at first, she didn’t understand what Ms. Boxer was saying. “It didn’t actually dawn on me that she was saying, ‘you don’t have children who can go to war,’ ” she said. “Which seems a rather strange comment, to be quite frank.”

A number of members of Congress have children in the military who are serving in Iraq or are likely to do so, including Senators John McCain of Arizona and Jim Webb of Virginia.

Ms. Boxer’s comments and the claims and counterclaims about what she meant have captivated the blogs and received extensive coverage on Fox News and other cable channels. One blog, Time magazine’s Swampland, labeled it the “Womb Wars.”

“I am deeply appalled by Senator Barbara Boxer’s cruel and callous attack on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,” said Deneen Borelli, a fellow with an organization called Project 21, which describes itself as a “leading voice in the African-American community.”

“The debate should have been about the war in Iraq and not a platform to demean Secretary Rice,” Ms. Borelli said in a statement issued by the organization.

Some Democratic Senate staffers complained privately that Ms. Boxer’s exchange with Ms. Rice allowed the Bush administration to turn the tables on Iraq critics and sidestep the larger issue of the almost uniform opposition to the president’s new plan to send an additional 21,500 U.S. soldiers to Iraq.

During a wide-ranging interview with The Times before she was scheduled to take off for a week-long trip to the Middle East, Ms. Rice said she had expected the skepticism that she received from Congress the day before. “I’ve been through things like this before,” she said. “I know people want to express frustration; I know they wanted to express their skepticism.” But, she said, “Skepticism isn’t a policy.”